Germany: Coronavirus aid resumes after scammers clone state website
Fraudsters cloned official government sites, hoping victims would apply there by mistake, allowing them to then claim the money in the victims' names. The scheme forced one state to shut down its website for a week.


Self-employed individuals and small businesses in Germany will again be eligible to apply online for coronavirus-related state emergency aid in North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW), the state's economic ministry said on Friday.

Applications had been halted shortly before the Easter holiday, when it was found that thieves had made a copy of the website which they were using for fraudulent activities.

NRW Economy Minister Andreas Pinkwart said the process to receive the aid would continue to be digital and that the money would be paid out next week.

As the coronavirus lockdown began, the German government swiftly approved a total of €50 billion ($54.382 billion) for rapid support to the self-employed and the smallest businesses with 10 or fewer employees.

Website cloned

Pinkwart had promised that the emergency aid would be "as simple, lean and unbureaucratic as possible," insisting that the office would "not accept printed applications."

Fraudsters moved quickly and intercepted prospective applicants by cloning the state's official website. When users entered their data into the fake site unwittingly, it was the fraudsters and not the government that was receiving it.

Scammers then took the data — including things like name, address, employer information, tax details and bank details — and then used it to apply for the money themselves on the real website, albeit with different bank details.

A state prosecutor's office told German news agency DPA last week that it was suspected the scams were being run by "a professional criminal organization" that appeared to cross national borders.

To protect from fraud, Pinkwart announced that tax officials would now check the applicants' data and compare it with the state's official information.

NRW is not the only state to have been affected. On Friday, Hamburg, Berlin, Saxony and Bremen all reported similar cases of fraud with their state aid websites.

Europe-wide scams

Last month, the European law enforcement agency Europol warned that criminals were taking advantage of the coronavirus emergency, doing everything from selling counterfeit products, impersonating health workers and hacking computers as many citizens do their jobs online at home.

"Criminals have quickly seized the opportunities to exploit the crisis by adapting their modes of operation or developing new criminal activities," Europol Executive Director, Catherine de Bolle said in a statement.

Europol's report found that the top illicit activities were cybercrime, fraud, counterfeit and substandard goods, and organized property crime.

jcg/msh (AFP, dpa)

AMERICAN RIGHT WING PROTESTERS R DUM

Christian Christensen

@ChrChristensen

Right-wingers in the US holding up signs saying "Be Like Sweden!" re #COVID19 might want to consider that Sweden also has universal healthcare, paid sick leave, paid maternity leave, paid parental leave, paid vacations and subsidized daycare and after-school care. #COVID19

What AOC Gets that Bernie Didn’tProgressive pot-stirrer Sean McElwee has some thoughts about what went wrong for Sanders supporters, and how they can get what they want (eventually).

Brittany Greeson/Getty Images
By MICHAEL GRUNWALD 04/16/2020
Michael Grunwald is a senior staff writer for Politico Magazine.

The 27-year-old progressive activist Sean McElwee made the POLITICO 50 list of influential thinkers in 2017 for “Abolish ICE,” a pithy slogan that more liberal Democrats adapted into a quixotic campaign to dismantle the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

It didn’t succeed, of course, and President Donald Trump gleefully elevated it into a symbol of out-of-touch Democratic extremism. But it stretched the limits of the immigration debate—and it became a rallying cry for young lefty insurgents like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Latina bartender from the Bronx who embraced it on the way to her out-of-nowhere upset of an establishment Democratic congressman.

McElwee, founder of the polling and policy group Data for Progress, is one of those young lefty insurgents, a proud limit-stretcher from the AOC-Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. But he’s a data guy as well as a progress guy, and he has some thoughts about why Sanders lost so handily to Joe Biden, an avatar of the old-school centrist Democratic thinking that McElwee yearns to disrupt.

The American left is at a crossroads, with some leading activists defiantly refusing to support Biden. McElwee thinks that’s a huge strategic mistake, and he doesn’t expect many progressives to make it in November; this week, Sanders and fellow liberal icon Elizabeth Warren endorsed Biden, and AOC also called for a united front against Trump. McElwee may be an ideologue, but he’s a pragmatic big-tent ideologue who believes the left can best advance its agenda from inside the Democratic Party—and can eventually come to control it.

First, though, McElwee believes the left needs to stop making other huge strategic mistakes. He’s a millennial with some surprisingly old-school ideas about politics, and he worries that his fellow young lefties will marginalize their movement if they think they can change the world without realistic compromise, serious policy work, transactional coalition-building and the kind of public opinion research that by one measure made Data for Progress the most accurate pollster of the 2020 primary.

He obviously grasps the allure of a slogan like Abolish ICE, but he also grasps the dangers of purism; he quips that he always advises politicians, like the patients in prescription drug ads, to ask their campaign managers if Abolish ICE is right for their districts. McElwee is big on metrics and policy details, and he wishes the rest of the left was, too.

In this conversation with POLITICO Magazine’s Michael Grunwald, McElwee shared his critical thoughts about the future of the left, its recent defeats at the polls, its reliance on mobilization rather than persuasion, its relationship with Biden and the Democratic Party, and why its politicians need to care about cheese as well as health care. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

***

GRUNWALD: Establishment sellout Joe Biden is the nominee! Is the left vanquished?

MCELWEE: Oh, I wouldn’t put it that way. The next generation of Democrats is much closer to the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth-Warren-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez view of the world than the Joe Biden view, and over time they’ll age into higher voting rates. Remember, Sanders became a senator at the height of the neoliberal-Third Way backlash to the New Deal-Great Society era, when it seemed like that centrist consensus had an eternal stranglehold over the party. AOC is entering politics at a very different time where progressives are winning more and more battles. Just a decade ago, 64 Democrats in the House wanted to attach a ban on abortion funding to Obamacare! Today, that would never happen. Today, we’re fighting about how ambitious the public option should be. Even with Biden as the nominee, the Democratic agenda is more progressive than ever.

But yeah, we lost a battle, and there were severe strategic missteps that people on the left are still underestimating. The media narrative was that Sanders was poised to win, but the early states were disproportionately caucus states and disproportionately white, which papered over some worrying political weaknesses for progressives. If Iowa and Nevada had been primaries, we would have seen those weaknesses earlier.

GRUNWALD: But Sanders seemed to do great for a socialist; he raised so much money and generated so much excitement. What do you mean by “severe strategic missteps”?

MCELWEE: If you had to boil it down to one problem, it was the belief the Sanders people articulated early on that in a big field, they could win the nomination with 30 percent of the vote. You know, elections tend to be won with 50 percent of the vote. If you’re not even trying to attract 50 percent to your vision, it leads to this view that you don’t need to persuade anyone, you just need to lock in the base and mobilize new voters. That’s setting yourself up for failure. And it’s inspired some very pernicious thinking in the progressive world: Those people who don’t believe what we believe, we can’t win them, so fuck them. You saw this most aggressively on Twitter, where you saw people say: “We need to crush these people, they’re forever lost to us.”

GRUNWALD: Bend the knee!

MCELWEE: Some people are like oh, Twitter, that’s not real. But the campaign articulated the same strategy! When we shut ourselves off from conversations about how to persuade voters, we’re making it a lot harder for progressives to win elections and deliver on progressive policy goals. Talking about which policies could work politically in Trump districts is not a fun conversation to have, but we need to have those conversations.

Look, one problem with running a campaign as a movement is that movements exist outside public opinion. It’s notable to me that Sanders and Warren both chose not to rely too much on pollsters. They got a lot of praise for that, but politics is about creating a nervous system for public opinion. You need constant feedback on your issues. I think one reason South Carolina and Super Tuesday came as such massive surprises was the campaigns focused on what moves small-dollar donors on Facebook and Twitter and so forth. Yeah, a viral ad with heated rhetoric can raise millions of dollars, but you don’t see the Americans who get turned off by it. There’s no emoji for that. They just go about their daily lives and don’t vote for you; you’re not even trying to reach them.

GRUNWALD: Right, a lot of progressives made fun of Biden’s boring message that America is a good country full of good people, kind of “Make America Decent Again.” But it worked.

MCELWEE: Again, Warren and Sanders chose not to invest heavily in polling or focus groups. They crafted powerful messages, and they executed well, but those messages didn’t hit the Democratic electorate. That’s why we do message testing and survey research! I’m a college-educated 18-to-34-year-old urban professional, so I’m a tiny percentage of the electorate. I’d be pretty surprised if what appealed to me appealed to the modal American voter. The modal American voter is noncollege and over 50. People like me have to stop trusting our instincts. We should make ads that nonpolitical voters want to see, not ads that we want to see. Go look at the ads by [Alabama Democratic senator] Doug Jones or [Michigan Democratic governor] Gretchen Whitmer; they might not seem appealing on social media but they move votes.

GRUNWALD: People always trash poll-tested, focused-grouped finger-in-the-wind politicians, but you’re suggesting it wouldn’t hurt the left to at least check which way the wind is blowing. Can you give an example of how refusing to do that hurt Sanders?

MCELWEE: Sanders did well with more independent nontraditional Democrats in 2016, and that convinced a lot of progressive leaders that his white working-class voters were supporting a progressive agenda, not just voting against Hillary Clinton. That led to some huge missteps in 2018, when the left was focused on knocking on doors in rural Wisconsin, while the center of the party targeted the so-called professional managerial class in the suburbs and turned a lot of districts from red to blue.

It turns out that noncollege whites are pretty conservative, while the much-derided “suburban wine moms” are much more supportive of a progressive agenda. The Republican agenda of tax cuts doesn’t really benefit them anymore, while Republican cuts to services like childcare and public higher education really hurt them. Jesse Ferguson told us in your magazine that the suburbs would be fertile ground, but we said fuck you, and we saw again in 2020 that the left is way behind in engaging with those voters.

GRUNWALD: But was it really just bad targeting? I mean, it’s hard to win a Democratic primary when you’re not a Democrat, and you’re expressing contempt for Democrats.

MCELWEE: It was smart of AOC to identify as a Democrat, because most Democrats do believe the things that progressives believe. And most Democrats have quite intense party loyalty. One of the biggest misunderstandings on the left is the idea that the Democratic brand is bad. In fact, the Democratic Party brand is one of the strongest brands in the country. It’s something millions of Americans trust. That includes the African American and Latino voters who are sympathetic to progressive ideas, and are voters we need to persuade to support our candidates. Running as an independent outsider would have helped Sanders in a general election, but it was definitely a problem in the primary.

Look, the Democratic Party is a coalition party with five partners: African American groups, Latino groups, women’s groups, unions and progressive groups. If you’re only one of five factions, maybe one-fourth of the party, you should only expect to win about one-fourth or one-fifth of the victories. You need to work with other groups in the coalition to achieve political success. Sometimes you’ll win, sometimes you’ll lose, that’s how life works. Ocasio-Cortez has figured that out, but not all progressives have.

GRUNWALD: Bernie is arguing that progressives won the ideas primary. Is that even true?

MCELWEE: It’s certainly true that most Democrats believe in very progressive ideas. It’s hard to find a progressive policy that doesn’t have strong support among Democrats. But this primary was about electability, and progressives weren’t able to persuade a majority of Democrats that their ideas are shared by a majority of the country. And that’s partly because Sanders and Warren didn’t emphasize the most popular progressive policies.

I mean, look at the Blue Dog Democrats. They don’t campaign on how Wall Street and pharma should be free to do whatever the fuck they want. They run on giving small-business loans to the troops, and protecting people with pre-existing conditions, and then after they win they vote to deregulate Wall Street and protect pharma. We should be talking about the parts of our agenda that are winners with voters, because there are progressive ideas that can fire up the base and persuade general election voters.

GRUNWALD: Like what?

MCELWEE: I’d propose a focus on paid family leave and childcare; ambitious climate action and clean energy; and lowering drug prices. You’ve got to narrow your agenda, because it’s hard to get voters to focus on too much. They have a lot going on their lives, from the Vanderpump Rules to getting their kids to school. With just those three priorities, you can show voters an agenda that will make their lives better, weaken major industries that are harming them, and put more money in their pockets. Why not focus on things that are popular?

GRUNWALD: It’s funny to hear you say that, because you came up with the idea of “Abolish ICE.” I remember it was your Twitter handle for a while. And that seems like a classic example of a lefty position that might be worthy to do but is terribly unpopular politically.

MCELWEE: We always saw it as left of the left spectrum, and that’s fine in some districts. One of the goals of activism and politics is to stretch the political imagination to understand the fundamental inhumanity of many of our institutions. “Abolish ICE” did that. Candidates like AOC who ran on it were representing their constituents. I don’t think we should be afraid to say that some Democrats in some districts are going to represent much more progressive interests than country as a whole. Nobody said “Abolish ICE” was a winning persuasion message. Not everything has to be a winning persuasion message. I’m just saying we need some winning persuasion messages to win nationwide.

GRUNWALD: Medicare for All was also seen as a far-left position that hurt Warren, and maybe Bernie too. And then Biden said, that’s a bit much, how about a public option? We’ll do more, just not everything. Apparently Democratic voters thought that was more realistic.

MCELWEE: It’s clear there’s significant Democratic support for a single-payer system. And the polling data didn’t show that Medicare for All was a wildly unpopular albatross. But voters were voting based on who was perceived as electable, and Medicare for All received significant amounts of negative earned media that made it seem like a problem. I think a candidate who embraced Medicare for All could defeat Trump, because Medicare is popular, and people understand the intuitive goal of expanding it to all Americans. But there was never much effort to explain what exactly it was. Was it an ideal? Was it a plan? What was the theory of the case for how would it be passed and implemented? This was an electability election, defined by competence and the ability to move an agenda, and voters didn’t believe progressives could do that.

GRUNWALD: Well, today Bernie endorsed Biden, so of course he’s a neoliberal sellout, too, at least on Twitter. A lot of lefties say they’re Never Biden, he’s just as bad as Trump.

MCELWEE: I think there are 50,000 Bernie-to-Trump voters, and they all have Twitter accounts. They’re an incredibly small portion of the electorate.

GRUNWALD: Fair enough, but it’s important for Biden to make sure the left comes out to support him. Are there policies he can adopt that would help?

MCELWEE: Again, I think the first thing the left and Biden need to understand is that the progressive agenda isn’t just a mobilization agenda; it can be a persuasion agenda. There are core groups with progressive voters but also persuadable voters, and I think those policies I mentioned can really help.

Take young people, A lot of young independents and Republicans who pulled the lever for Trump in 2016 are worried about core elements of Trump’s agenda, especially climate change. I think a strong climate agenda that emphasizes job creation as well as equity issues can be a central element of a persuasion agenda. And remember, not all African Americans and Latinos are Democrats. We need to hit those voters with compelling messages that fit with their lived experiences, and a focus on environmental justice and clean water and clean air can be very persuasive.

The next group I’d look at are suburban women. They’re not all Democrats, either, and plenty of the ones who voted for Trump are now persuadable. A paid leave and childcare agenda could really speak to the rising economic costs they’re facing. And then you’ve got older persuadables. Trump has absolutely failed to deliver pharmaceutical reform or reduce drug prices, and Democrats could make inroads on those issues. So I’ve named you a bunch of progressive policies that poll at 70 to 80 percent. Those would be some great issues where Biden could be looking to embrace the left.

GRUNWALD: You’re talking about policies that can persuade less progressive voters. But what about the hardcore left? I always saw Bernie as a cool and fun cause for young rebels; supporting Biden obviously isn’t cool or fun. But I saw Cornel West said he’s not going to vote third party this year because the left needs to join an anti-fascist coalition against Trump — that makes it sound kind of cool and fun! Could that mobilize the left?

MCELWEE: I think the vast majority of progressives will come out for Biden. Right now, we’re still in a period of mourning, and frankly, Biden will never drive a lot of enthusiasm. But at the end of the day, we have Donald Trump on the ballot, and every day he does something worse. There are some media personalities who would benefit from Biden losing, but no one who cares about progressive values would see Trump’s reelection as a victory. You also have far less compelling third-party candidates than you had in 2016. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson were both effective politicians, whether or not you liked them. This time, you’re not seeing that kind of third-party candidate, and I think you’ll see a pretty dramatic decline in third-party voters. Candidate quality matters!

Still, as I said, there are a lot of progressive policies Biden could adopt that would make him more attractive to progressives while also helping to persuade the unpersuaded.

GRUNWALD: He just endorsed Medicare for 60-year-olds. He’s come out for student loan relief, some of Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy reforms. Will the left meet him halfway?

MCELWEE: Sure. Remember, Biden is viewed a bit more favorably with the left than Hillary Clinton was. We can have a long conversation about why, but it’s a fact. And Bernie Sanders has a closer relationship with Biden than he had with Clinton in 2016. Also, Clinton was deep in the weeds on policy, which made it harder for her to make concessions to the left. With Biden, you see a real interest in finding areas where there could be unity, and I think there’s more interest from all the wings of the party in having unity in 2020. I remain optimistic about a united front.

GRUNWALD: You may be a wacko radical, but you’re a pretty pragmatic dude.

MCELWEE: My view is that politics is the slow boring of hard boards. Really, that view almost overstates how quickly political change happens. Look, in 2020, mistakes were made, but the basic problem was that the progressive movement wasn’t yet powerful enough to win a Democratic primary. We’ll be back at it in four or eight years. Eventually, we will be powerful enough, and we’ll have the opportunity to pass a lot of laws.

I’d like to see progressives focus on building the infrastructure and policy support for our priorities. I do worry about the lack of dedication to learning the nitty-gritty details of how the process works. I’ve worked on legislation in New York state, and I’ve seen how the simplest thing, like changing voter registration from opt-in to opt-out at the DMV, can require an incredible amount of bureaucratic competence, technical capacity, things like that. Progressives need to dedicate ourselves to learning how those bureaucracies function, or we’re going to be woefully unprepared to implement our agenda.

I also think progressives need to focus on building power down ballot. We always complain that Obama failed to do this, but we seem to forget it the second we start thinking about our own movement: This year, a progressive came within 4 points of beating [conservative Democratic Texas congressman] Henry Cuellar. Every progressive who’s doing an autopsy of the presidential primary should be doing an autopsy of why we didn’t invest more in that race. There’s been an utter neglect of down-ballot work.

GRUNWALD: You mentioned ways that Biden can reach out to the left, and also the need for progressives to get deeper into the weeds. The Green New Deal seems to be right in the intersection of those two concepts, where Biden seems open to real climate action, and progressive groups like yours have done a lot of work on a real agenda that’s helped change the conversation in America. But not always in a good way; Republicans have started trashing all climate action as Green New Deal radicalism, banning cows and airplanes. What have you learned from the Green New Deal process?

MCELWEE: I think we’ve learned to understand how our agendas are going to be attacked, and how we can prepare for those attacks. For example, there needs to be a cost estimate, because otherwise the right will make up its own. We came up with a cost estimate for AOC’s Green New Deal for Public Housing, and even when Republicans would attack it, they would use our estimates for costs and jobs. That’s better than letting them fill in blanks. We also did polling ahead of time, so we could show it was a popular idea. Otherwise, if an idea becomes tarred as unpopular, it actually becomes unpopular. Our internal research found that merely showing people evidence that an idea was popular increased support for that idea.

Again, these are procedural matters. They’re not big ideas. This is the blocking and tackling that we need to get down tighter. Look, we’ve found that you can’t get voters, particularly black and Latino voters, to care about climate change if you don’t connect it to their communities, issues like toxic mold and clean water. But it turns out that’s a very popular approach with the entire public.

GRUNWALD: But the Green New Deal itself has become kind of toxic itself. Now it’s seen as cow farts and the eleventy-trillion-dollar Republican cost estimate and banning airplanes, which I guess ended up happening anyway. Is that reversible?

MCELWEE: Again, the things at the edge of public consciousness are always going to be unpopular. If they were popular, they wouldn’t be at the edge of public consciousness and political reality. But the Green New Deal has pretty dramatically expanded what Democrats want to do on climate without impacting our partisan advantage on climate.

GRUNWALD: The slow boring of hard boards, right? You want the left to do less of the sexy stuff and more of the unglamorous stuff.

MCELWEE: A lot of leftists don’t think of Data for Progress as a leftist organization—not because they don’t think we’re leftists, but because we started an organization! We’re engaging in politics! And yeah, we’re engaging with Democrats; we gave advice to every primary candidate except Tulsi Gabbard. I always say we love all Democrats, just in different amounts. Working and pushing inside the Democratic Party is the way that progressive gains will happen. They’ll never be exactly what we want, but that’s life.

GRUNWALD: You’re kind of saying: Trust the process.

MCELWEE: Well, a lot of progressives were upset about the Affordable Care Act. And yeah, we wish there was a public option. But look what happened: The Medicaid expansion has been a big success, while the private exchanges have struggled, and that’s helped make our case that delivering concrete benefits through the public sector works, and it’s undermined the neoliberal policy strategy. My view is that the Democratic Party is moving every day towards a place where young progressives should feel comfortable. AOC is going to be the moral center of the party in a decade, and it’s not just her.

It’s going to take some time. You saw how long it took movement conservatism to take over the Republican Party. And we’re going to have to do the hard work of reaching out to nonideological Democrats who don’t see the world our way. I mean, look at [conservative Democratic congressman] Dan Lipinski, we finally beat him, and that’s great, but he still got nearly 50 percent of Democratic voters—not because he’s pro-life, but because he sits on the transportation committee and works with local unions to represent their interests. We can’t forget about that kind of basic politics. Bernie Sanders always made sure to deliver for Vermont. [Wisconsin Senator] Tammy Baldwin is a great progressive, and she’s got a big interest in single-payer health care, but she also has a big interest in cheese. It’s OK for progressives to care about cheese.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=AOC

WATCH: John Oliver tries to ‘cast out’ right-wing media like a televangelist

April 20, 2020 By Sarah K. Burris


“Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver appeared Sunday while still quarantining from what he refers to as his “white void.”

He returned to talk about coronavirus, noting that it’s hard to keep up with the information and misinformation about COVID-19. For example, microwaving your mail doesn’t save you and don’t buy breast milk, it isn’t a cure.

Oliver turned to bash the protesters that were outside of state capitols over the weekend, demanding an end to the lockdown during the pandemic.

“It will force us to stay at home longer!” Oliver exclaimed. “How could people possibly believe sh*t like that?”

But the bad information people are absorbing is coming from three major sources, he explained.

His first example: TV preacher Kenneth Copeland, who “took care” of COVID-19 weeks ago by “blowing the wind of God from you.” He explained that his spell would destroy it forever, and it would “never be back.”

“Spitting all over the place is not going to cure anything unless your goal is to give the coronavirus the coronavirus,” said Oliver.

Televangelists are just one of the many places people can get information. There was the conspiracy theory that 5G gives it to you, prompting people in the UK to set fire to cellular towers. Such BS comes from lies on the internet that people read on message boards and somehow believe are true.

But the main cause of misinformation is conservative news, Oliver explained.

Rush Limbaugh, for example, has been saying that the coronavirus was nothing more than “the common cold.” He claimed that it was the 19th coronavirus and that there have been 18 before it. As Kellyanne Conway learned this week, COVID-19 stands for corona-virus-2019.

Oliver noted that it has been easy for people in conservative media to fold COVID into their conspiracy theories they’ve been sowing for years. Fox News, for example, tried to downplay the warnings and deaths, claiming that it was all a lie from the liberal media. The problem, of course, is that as the virus spread, the numbers are spiking, and their own viewers are dying.

The network welcoming on Dr. Phil, who was trending on Twitter for almost two days after he claimed coronavirus, wasn’t as dangerous as car crashes, smoking deaths, or drownings. He didn’t even get the number right for the people who die of drowning, which he claimed was over 300,000. In fact, it’s only 4,000.

Now Fox is on the move for promoting an unproven drug used to help cure Malaria and to treat things like Lupus. Tucker Carlson welcomed on a guest who was an “adviser to Stanford University,” which proved to be news to Stanford, who said they’d never heard of the guy. But Carlson touted him as some kind of expert on the drug hydroxychloroquine.

Oliver said it’s easy to write off people like Limbaugh or Fox News, but they draw a massive million-person audience to hear the nonsense. Sean Hannity similarly has been spreading lies like claiming hydroxychloroquine can save people’s lives because after taking the drug, they got over coronavirus. Oliver explained that someone he knows ate a hotdog and didn’t even get COVID, so it clearly is the miracle cure people have been waiting for.

“I get Trump, Fox, and those protesters want this to be over, and I do too,” Oliver said. “But for what it’s worth, I know people who’ve died from this. And I know people who are taking hydroxychloroquine because they think it will save them. And I know people with Lupus who are down to their last pills.”

One trick Oliver hasn’t tried to get rid of the right-wing media is to blow on them like Kenneth Copeland did to banish the coronavirus. So, he gave it a shot. It’s unclear if it will work.

Watch his takedown below

Here’s what Christian farmers I know think about COVID-19 — and how it might bring America together
 April 18, 2020 Salon- Commentary


Eric Wolgemuth, a 58-year-old farmer who lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, called me at my home in San Francisco to check in not long after the school that my son attends officially closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. “You know what folks are saying around here, don’t you?” Eric’s voice is low, with a touch of a drawl.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a Democratic conspiracy,” he said, referring to the maelstrom in the news surrounding the virus.

Eric and I hail from completely different worlds. He is a devout Christian, from a largely white and rural community where many never go to college; I’m a biracial city dweller and a member of the coastal elite. We might have never crossed paths but for the farm that my family has long owned in Nebraska. Eric is what’s known as a “custom harvester”: Every year, he hires a crew of young men to work as independent contractors, and they drive semi trucks, tractors and combine equipment hundreds of miles from Pennsylvania to the Great Plains to cut wheat for farmers—including my family.

A job on Eric’s crew is competitive. This year Eric had chosen two new men to operate trucks, but they had not received their CDL licenses before the DMV shut down in mid-March. In early April, Eric usually drives to Grand Island, Nebraska, to pick up freshly manufactured combine harvesters. But the order is delayed this year and it’s unclear if the machines will be ready for harvest in May.

Other harvesters he knew had even worse problems; Jim Deibert, based in Colby, Kansas, usually hires men from Australia and South Africa. Travel restrictions have made it impossible to bring in international travel workers this year, leaving men like Jim without a team.

As we talked about the changes that COVID-19 was bringing to our two worlds, I thought back to a trip I took with Eric and his crew during the 2017 harvest. He had invited me to come along so I could better understand the world of agriculture.

On the road, religion had been a constant. Eric has always recruited from Amish, Mennonite and other Anabaptist families in his community. Each Sunday, we went to church, and Eric prayed before every meal. And one unexpected subject recurred with a tenacious intensity: What would happen, the crew liked to muse, during the apocalypse?

One time, the fantasy involved all satellites world-wide breaking down. The people in the city — who couldn’t hunt, farm or fix their own machinery — would go hungry. They would need help from men like the harvesters to repair all the equipment.

Then the crew pondered an even bigger problem: the food supply. “Won’t take long for them to show up and take your food, Eric,” said Amos, another member of the crew. Amos was referring to the immense grain bins that Eric has on his property in Pennsylvania, filled with wheat, corn and soybeans; successful farmers like Eric store grain and wait to sell it when the price is opportune. Other farmers must either sell right after harvest or pay rent to pool their grain in a cooperative storage facility.

Eric insisted there would be no problem. “We’d feed the people. We’d have a soup kitchen,” he said. Feeding people was, for Eric, part of being a Christian — and a farmer.

The fantasy persisted. “Do you think God will deliver a message soon? To show that social media is a deviation from God’s message and show city people how selfish they are?” Amos asked.

Eric’s 23-year-old son, Juston, frequently interjected during these heated conversations. City people, he said, shouldn’t be so easily dismissed: “Who do you think buys the food we grow?”

Another time, I brought up a U.N. report that projected that by 2050, Earth would be home to 9.8 billion people. To feed them, we would either need to get more food out of the planet or make more arable land by clearing forests, perhaps even the Amazon. Eric thought instead that we ought to try to colonize Mars: Men like the harvesters were well equipped for the loneliness of space and the daily work of planting and harvesting.

Michael didn’t see the point. “Revelation is coming,” he said. God would soon judge us, and there was no reason to extend our lives through space exploration.

Another harvester, Samuel, agreed. He had traveled to Israel to study the Book of Revelation — the final book in the Protestant Bible — and had concluded that the end times were indeed coming.

So ingrained were such ideas that it became impossible for me to enter the world of the harvesters fully without contending with the idea of an apocalypse. But over time, I began to suspect that, at least for these men, the end-times fantasies weren’t solely about “city people” getting their comeuppance.

“People don’t understand how much heart and soul goes into farming,” Amos said to me sorrowfully on more than one occasion. He wanted city dwellers to know that his work mattered. He, like the other harvesters, wanted to be seen.

That summer, I spent more time with the Bible than I ever had. I reread Revelation, which indeed contains quite a lot about precisely how the world would end. But one thing is often left out when Revelation is discussed: At the end of the world, things aren’t completely destroyed. There are no farms, but there is a city. The tree of life, not seen since Genesis, stands in the middle of this city and — like some replicator from “Star Trek” — makes enough food so people will never go hungry.

I sometimes asked the farmers about the implications of all of us ending up in a city, the place many of them regarded with such suspicion. Samuel, who had read Revelation so carefully, said, “She’s right,” and offered nothing more.

Back on the phone just days ago, Eric and I reminisced about these conversations. He said he has been staying at home with his family and attending church over the Internet. But come April 15, he will begin planting corn on his own farmland. The first week of May, he will drive out to Texas with his crew to start the wheat harvest. “This is the real deal,” he said of the virus. But quarantine or no, the grain won’t wait and will need to be taken from the field. “I had hoped this would bring us together.”

“It still might,” I said. “We kind of have no choice.”

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of the book “American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland,” out now from Graywolf Press.

France says no evidence Covid-19 linked to Wuhan research lab set up with French help

April 18, 2020 By Agence France-Presse


France on Friday said there was no factual evidence so far of a link between the Covid-19 outbreak and the work of the P4 research laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which France helped set up and where the current pandemic started.

“We would like to make it clear that there is to this day no factual evidence corroborating recent reports in the US press linking the origins of Covid-19 and the work of the P4 laboratory of Wuhan, China,” an official at President Emmanuel Macron‘s office said.

The broad scientific consensus holds that SARS-CoV-2, the official name of the coronavirus, originated in bats.

In 2004, France signed an agreement with China to establish a research lab on infectious diseases of biosafety level 4, the highest level, in Wuhan, according to a French decree signed by then-foreign minister Michel Barnier.

US trying to determine if virus originated in lab
US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday his government was trying to determine whether the coronavirus emanated from a lab in Wuhan, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Beijing “needs to come clean” on what they know.

General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that US intelligence indicates that the coronavirus likely occurred naturally, as opposed to being created in a laboratory in China, but there is no certainty either way.

The Washington Post said this week that national security officials in the Trump administration have long suspected research facilities in Wuhan to be the source of the novel coronavirus outbreak.

As far back as February, the Chinese state-backed Wuhan Institute of Virology dismissed rumours that the virus may have been artificially synthesised at one of its laboratories or perhaps escaped from such a facility.

The allegations came amid mounting international criticism of China’s initial cover-up of the virus and suspicions that Beijing had not revealed the extent of the public health crisis due to economic concerns.

China on Friday revised its pandemic toll again, this time by a major 50 percent increase in the total death toll. But Chinese authorities denied it was due to a cover-up, maintaining the revision was due to insufficient capacity during the peak of the pandemic.

The lab at the heart of the controversy
The Wuhan research laboratory at the heart of the controversy is home to the China Centre for Virus Culture Collection, the largest virus bank in Asia which, preserves more than 1,500 strains, according to its website.

The complex contains Asia’s first maximum security lab equipped to handle Class 4 pathogens (P4) — dangerous viruses that pose a high risk of person-to-person transmission, such as Ebola.

The 300 million yuan ($42 million) lab was completed in 2015, and finally opened in 2018, with the founder of a French bio-industrial firm, Alain Merieux, acting as a consultant in its construction. The institute also has a P3 laboratory that has been in operation since 2012.

The 3,000-square-metre P4 lab, located in a square building with a cylindrical annex, lies near a pond at the foot of a forested hill in Wuhan’s remote outskirts.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)

Poll shows majority of Americans support canceling rent and suspending mortgage payments during pandemic

April 19, 2020 By Common Dreams


New polling from the think tank Data for Progress shows that a majority of Americans across the political spectrum support canceling rent payments and suspending home mortgage payments during the coronavirus pandemic—results that bolster the argument for legislation introduced Friday by Rep. Ilhan Omar to provide relief to “the millions of Americans currently at risk of housing instability and homelessness.”

Under the Minnesota Democrat’s bill, a summary from her office explains (pdf), “payments on all rental homes will be canceled and landlords will be able to apply to have their losses covered by the federal government through a Rental Property Relief Fund to be administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Additionally, all home mortgage payments will be suspended with mortgage holders being eligible to apply to a similar, HUD-operated Home Lenders Relief Fund.”

As Omar unveiled the Rent and Mortgage Cancelation Act, backed by fellow progressives in Congress and several advocacy groups, Data for Progress, People’s Action, and Justice Democrats on Friday released a memo (pdf) about the polling results. “With millions of renters in a desperate situation, bold legislation to relieve renters is imperative,” the memo says. “Eviction moratoriums—which postpone rent payments, but don’t cancel them—are only a first step, but they are not enough.”

My bill to cancel rent and mortgages isn’t just necessary, it’s popular.
55% of Americans support it, including Republicans. Only 33% oppose.
There’s no reason this should not be on the table in the next relief package!https://t.co/RyJXin2Q78
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) April 17, 2020

Data for Progress found that 55% of all voters somewhat or strongly support a policy that would suspend mortgage payments and cancel rent payments, and not require renters to pay rent that accumulated during the the pandemic. Broken down by political parties, that policy is supported by 67% of Democrats, 48% of Independents, and 42% of Republicans.

A similar policy that would require renters to eventually pay back all rent accumulated during the pandemic garnered even higher support. Across all voters, 63% supported that policy. The party breakdown was: 77% of Democrats, 56% of Independents, and 50% of Republicans.

The memo points out that “some in government are beginning to act,” highlighting housing relief efforts in New York and that “a growing number of states and cities have placed a moratorium on evictions.” However, the document adds, “this isn’t enough. Rent hasn’t been canceled—it’s simply been postponed.”

“As the coronavirus pandemic continues to place millions of Americans in a difficult economic situation,” the memo concludes, “lawmakers should pursue the cancelation and forgiveness of rent for all tenants in the U.S., knowing that a clear majority of Americans are on their side.”

New from @DataProgress + @justicedems + @PplsAction shows voters support @Ilhan‘s rent suspension and cancellation proposal. With partisan framing and arguments, the policy has 63% in support, 25% opposed. https://t.co/0THWW9wSAV
the supreme court will destroy everything we want (@SeanMcElwee) April 17, 2020

In a statement Saturday about the new polling, Justice Democrats noted:

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a Harvard University report found that nearly half of renters in the U.S. are “cost-burdened,” spending more than 30% of their income on housing, and a quarter of renters are “severely cost-burdened,” meaning they spend more than half of their income to make the rent. The pandemic has exacerbated America’s housing crisis, leaving millions of renters in desperate circumstances and in dire need of bold legislation that goes beyond eviction moratoriums.

Justice Democrats executive director Alexandra Rojas urged members of Congress to urgently pass legislation that is ambitious enough to meet the needs of those negatively affected by the virus outbreak that continues to ravage communities across the country.

“We need to keep money in the pockets of working people in this country and a moratorium on rent and evictions is a major step in the right direction,” Rojas said. “The focus of additional COVID-19 emergency relief packages should match the scale of the crisis that millions of Americans are facing.”

NOT 1917
The ‘Spanish’ flu outbreak of 1918 is playing out just like ‘reopen’ protesters are in 2020: report

April 19, 2020 Sarah K. Burris


National Public Radio reporter Tim Mak wrote an extensive Twitter thread after researching the way the flu outbreak spread throughout the United States in the early 20th century.

It began in San Francisco in Sept. 1918, he explained, and people were successfully wearing masks and cases were dropping. By November, public health officials said the city could reopen.

“Residents rushed to entertainment venues after having been denied this communal joy for months. The mayor himself was fined by his own police chief after going to a show without a mask,” said Mak.

Another wave of the virus came in Dec. 1918 and the health officials told people to start wearing masks again, but people refused. Businesses were worried about their Christmas sales, so they opposed the efforts, as did the Culinary Workers Union. Residents were over it, and they’d already been dealing with it for months. Police began fining or arresting people for not wearing masks, which sparked lawsuits from people claiming it was their Constitutional right to risk their own lives.

Christian Scientists said it was “subversive of personal liberty” and civil libertarians claimed no one could force them to wear masks.

After the San Francisco Chronicle came out against mandatory masks, the death rate continued to climb, said Mak.

“An op-ed ran in the local paper w/headline ‘What’s The Use?’ after a man got sick despite following public health guidelines,” he explained. “A promised vaccine turned out to be bogus. Hundreds of citizens congregated on Dec. 16 to debate a masking order.”

On Dec. 18, a bomb was sent to the city’s public health official.

San Francisco’s Public Health Officer stuck by his guns, refusing to back down, and saying there was evidence that masks helped!

He implored the public to look to the data! Wear masks! They help!

More via Crosby: pic.twitter.com/i9lI6cxCHY
— Tim Mak (@timkmak) April 19, 2020


On Dec. 19, he explained that officials voted down an order that would make wearing a mask mandatory.

“The dollar sign is exalted above the health sign,” the public health officer said, according to Mak.

The worst rate of deaths from the flu pandemic was Dec. 30.

“It is of no time to quibble over the worth of the mask. It is the best thing we have found to date, and if you have anything better, for God’s sake, give it to us,” said a representative of an organized labor group.

Finally, the council reconsidered their vote and passed the order on Jan. 10. A whopping 600 new cases were reported just that day.

“Citizens were arrested/fined for not having masks on, but widespread disobedience of the order continue & large numbers of citizens refused to wear masks,” said Mak, noting that the protests still continued.

“Over 2,000 people attended an event formed by San Franciscans called themselves ‘THE ANTI-MASK LEAGUE,’ denouncing the mandatory masking ordinance.

The protesters were a group of “public-spirited citizens, skeptical physicians, and fanatics,” Crosby wrote.

Stockton Daily Evening Record
(Stockton, California)
21 Jan 1919, Tue
Page 1 pic.twitter.com/mWofM4todZ

— Maureen Moore (@HopesMom12) April 19, 2020

It was something Mak noted was remarkably similar to what is happening today with the protests around the country demanding a reopening of the government even if it will kill people.

He noted that the public health officer was the 1919 version of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the NIH virus expert that has been appointed to the coronavirus task force by the president. President Donald Trump’s supporters have now decided that they are against Fauci.

To this day, Mak said that no one credits wearing masks with helping stop the flu pandemic of the era.

SOURCES:

The University of Michigan's Influenza Encyclopedia
The San Francisco Chronicle’s archives
America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 by Alfred W. Crosby
American Pandemic by Nancy Bristow

/END THREAD

— Tim Mak (@timkmak) April 19, 2020

While the flu was referred to as the “Spanish Flu,” it actually had nothing to do with Spain, it’s that Spain was the first country to talk about it openly. Other countries were suffering from it but were dealing with WWI battles. The flu spread throughout trenches during the war, killing over 45,000 American soldiers and hospitalizing 1.2 million soldiers.

SOURCES:

The University of Michigan's Influenza Encyclopedia
The San Francisco Chronicle’s archives
America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 by Alfred W. Crosby
American Pandemic by Nancy Bristow

/END THREAD
— Tim Mak (@timkmak) April 19, 2020

Read his full thread on Twitter.

No — that $20 million for Ruth’s Chris isn’t going to workers at franchises
April 19, 2020 By Sarah K. Burris


Ruth’s Chris steak house was among the corporations that scored millions of dollars that were supposed to be allocated to small businesses. But according to the Wall Street Journal, those hefty loans aren’t being sent to the overwhelming majority of employees of the famous steakhouse.

Out of the 83 Ruth’s Chris steak houses in the United States, 73 are franchises, leaving just 25 to spend the $20 million as well as their corporate offices, CEOs and the top echelon of the C-suite.

“At least two other restaurant chains took advantage of that provision, public filings and interviews show. Brazilian steakhouse chain Fogo de Chão Inc. also got $20 million, and casual-dining company J. Alexander’s Holdings Inc. received $15.1 million,” said the report.

There are thousands of employees among those businesses that are suffering in the time of COVID-19, but the overwhelming majority are employed at those franchises that aren’t getting the bucket of bailout cash from the president


“We will be following all guidelines set forth by the [Small Business Administration] in how the funds are being leveraged, including payroll assurance for our team members in individual locations running our takeout and delivery business,” Ruth’s claimed in a statement.

“This is outrageous,” the Journal quoted House Small Business Committee Chairwoman Nydia Velázquez (D-NY), who asked for an inspector general investigation at the SBA. She called the White House to release information about loan recipients to “root out any signs of favoritism and mishandling.”

Read the full report at the Wall Street Journal.

Trump admin awards N95 contract far above normal price to bankrupt company with no employees: report

April 18, 2020 By Salon


The Trump administration awarded an N95 mask procurement contract worth eight times the usual price to a bankrupt company with no employees which has never even manufactured the respirator masks, according to a new report.

The company, Panthera, claims to provide tactical training and “mission support” for the Department of Defense and other government agencies. However, it has no experience with manufacturing or medical equipment, The Washington Post reported this week. Panthera’s parent company filed for bankruptcy in the fall, and it has not employed anyone since May 2018.

According to the contract terms, FEMA will pay Panthera $55 million for 10 million N95 respirator masks, or $5.50 a mask. 3M, one of the nation’s largest manufacturers, charges the government between $0.63 and $1.50 per N95 mask, depending on the model. Prestige Ameritech, the largest U.S. mask manufacturer, charged FEMA about $0.80 cents per mask in an order of 12 million.

FEMA clarified that Panthera is a distributor — not a manufacturer. A Panthera executive told The Post he had made the arrangements through his military contacts and claimed he would deliver on the contract before May 1 “for certain” and “with a very high-quality product.”

FEMA said it complied with federal law in the Panthera purchase, and the contracting officer for the deal “conducted a contractor responsibility determination.”

A chronic shortage of N95s has plagued the U.S. since the outbreak began, and demand for the uniquely-configured masks still has not been met, in part because they are difficult to make. The machines that manufacture them take half a year to build and cost upwards of $4 million.

The combination of demand and the U.S. government’s laggard response has chummed the market for protective medical equipment, and grifters have been quick to pounce. A Georgia man was charged in mid-April with trying to sell $750 million worth of non-existent masks and other equipment. Major U.S. vendors have caught flak for selling masks to foreign buyers.

In response to questions about persistent mask shortages, President Donald Trump suggested, without evidence, that individuals might be taking the masks “out the back door” of hospitals. The president also often complains that healthcare workers will not sanitize masks for multiple uses.

“We have very good liquids for doing this — sanitizing the masks — and that that’s something they’re starting to do more and more,” the president said. “They’re sanitizing the masks.” (While FDA guidelines for N95 respirators say they “should not be shared or reused,” they stop short of prohibiting it outright.)

The Department of Health and Human Services first notified companies Feb. 24 that it would be placing bulk N95 orders, but it did not act in earnest until a month later. The Trump administration has in recent weeks placed orders for $628 million worth of masks, with HHS accounting for more about two-thirds of those purchases.

“All the traditional procurement rules are out the window,” Rick Grimm, director of the National Institute of Governmental Purchasing, which advises state and local governments on procurement, said. Unstable markets are often rife with price gouging and poor products, such as Chinese KN95 masks, which were initially banned by FDA until a dearth of masks in early April forced the agency to accept them. One medical supplies broker told Forbes, “This is the craziest market I’ve ever seen.”

Two days before the KN95 ban was lifted, Salon obtained an email from Robert Hyde — whose text messages with Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas about surveilling U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich made him a target of the impeachment investigation — in which he claimed to have access to 10 million masks, deliverable the next week. He also tweeted photos that day of boxes of Chinese KN95 masks, which were banned in the U.S. at the time.

Hyde told Salon that he would import most of the masks from unnamed Chinese and Israeli suppliers. He also claimed to have a $25 million product order from New York hospitals, though no evidence was provided.

Hyde said he first planned to “collect donations” but took a capitalist approach after learning market prices ran between $1.90 and $6.90 per mask before his own sales markup for target clients: state governments and hospitals.

“Is cost really an issue when people are catching this virus?” he said in an interview. “What’s five bucks? What’s ten bucks?”

The self-identified “landscaper from Connecticut” and current congressional candidate has repeatedly dismissed the coronavirus pandemic, downplaying the death rate and claiming in a tweet that “we are being lied to” about the virus’s lethality. On March 29 he asked, “Are your hospitals overwhelmed, as the panic master’s claim?”

Two weeks before that, however, Hyde gained a continuance to a federal grand jury subpoena after claiming to an FBI agent that he had been exposed to the coronavirus at February’s CPAC conference. The FBI agent replied, “Lying to federal officials is a federal crime and can be charged as an offense.” (The subpoena is in connection to Hyde’s texts with Parnas about surveilling Yovanovich.)

In another series of emails and texts, obtained by Salon, a Texas woman named Sheri Aaron pitched a sitting U.S. senator from Virginia on purchasing an array of medical equipment from an anonymous third party, including multiple ventilator models and up to 110 million KN95 masks, at the time banned in the states. Aaron told Salon “the intent was to let those public officials making the calls for assistance aware there may be available supplies from an independent vendor” but did not reveal the name of the supplier.

Kathleen O’Neill contributed to this report.